The best apps for writing take the needs of your work into consideration. If you write movie and TV scripts, for example, you need a tool that can help you appropriately format your work and keep track of all the details, such as locations, character names, and scene numbers. Fade In is a low-cost, competitive screenwriting app that helps scriptwriters work efficiently and in an organized fashion. Fade In costs less than half as much as competitor Final Draft (an industry standard), but still comes close to matching the latter’s features. If you’re not ready to pay the premium cost for Final Draft, Fade In is an excellent alternative.
How Much Does Fade In Cost?
Fade In charges $79.95 for its desktop app, which is available for macOS, Windows, and Linux. You can use the same license to install the software on as many personal devices that you own, no matter what desktop platform. Additionally, once you pay for the software, you get free upgrades to any new versions. Fade In’s Android and iOS apps cost an additional one-time fee of $4.99.
Compared with other screenplay-writing software, Fade In is reasonably priced. For example, Final Draft costs $249.99 and requires you to pay for some updates. Script Studio charges $199.95 and limits you to installing the software on two devices at a time.
Scrivener costs less at $49, although it’s better for writing novels, long-form papers, and other formats that aren’t screenplays. Ulysses is similar to Scrivener; it costs $49 per year.
Fade In Basics
Like other screenplay-writing software, Fade In comes with tools for automatically formatting your script to industry standards. It also helps you organize your work and stay consistent with character names, scene locations, and so forth.
The reason screenwriters need tools for formatting and consistency, is because when a script goes into preproduction and production, everyone on the team needs to know how to distinguish a line of dialogue, from an action, from a camera shot. Everyone needs to know how many locations will be used in shooting and what they are. Every actor needs to be able to identify their lines easily.
For example, before any line of dialogue, the speaker’s name appears centered and in all caps. When you type your screenplay using Fade In, it lets you indicate which text refers to a character or a line of dialogue, for instance, and then formats the line correctly. Once Fade In captures the name of a character, it can anticipate new lines of dialogue; if you type the character’s name in all caps, Fade In will center the name. The software also compiles metadata about scripts, such as the number of locations and characters.
Final Draft does all this, too, although it’s a little smarter. Once Final Draft knows the names of your characters, it offers to autocomplete them when you type the first letter or two. That writing app does the same for other elements that may repeat, such as locations.
Fade In has tools for planning, writing, and editing screenplays, too. Virtual index cards, for example, let you plan out, view, and edit the order of your scenes on cards. When you change the order of the cards, the scenes automatically reorder themselves on the page. A Navigator tool works similarly and shows you a preview of your scenes to the side of your pages in a separate window. You can drag and drop scenes to reorder them from the Navigator.
Another tool in Fade In lets you save alternate dialogue options. The number of options appears off to the side of the line and you use an arrow key to toggle through them. I would prefer the option to reveal all the options stacked on top of one another, so that they are easier to compare.
One feature Fade In doesn’t have that Final Draft does is a Beat Board. In Final Draft, the Beat Board is another index card-like view where you can map out the beats of your script on color-coded cards. You can then place those cards in a timeline view that appears at the top of your page to see roughly when in the script a certain action or plot turn should happen. For example, if you want to make sure a chase scene happens in the first 10 minutes of the script or that there’s a plot twist by the end of act two, you can bookmark those moments to help keep yourself on track. Fade In doesn’t offer anything quite like that yet.
Additional Features
Fade In does have a few other unique features worth mentioning. The Dialogue Tuner, for example, pulls up all the lines of dialogue for a given character. It’s a nice way to quickly make sure that a character speaks in the same manner, style, and tone throughout the script. There’s also a virtual table read feature (Final Draft has this as well). You can choose voices for each character and the narrator, although they’re all computerized and have a flat intonation. At least you have the option to listen to a voice other than yours read your work aloud. Fade In includes a writing timer tool, as well.
One feature in both Fade In and Final Draft is the ability to upload PDFs of scripts and have the app turn them into editable text in script format. I tested this feature in Final Draft and Fade In using the same script (Black Swan). The feature worked in both apps, but the result in Final Draft needed less cleanup. Fade In uploaded the whole script twice, so I had to remove half of the resulting file. There were other minor marks on the script, such as additional numbering and comments, that both Fade In and Final Draft misinterpreted.
In addition to importing PDFs, you can also work with file formats such as CELTX, CXSCRIPT, FDX, FDR, TXT, Fountain, Highland, HTML, RTF, SCRIV, and XML. You can export to TXT EPUB, FDX, Fountain, HTML, XML, and RTF.
Fade In supports a long list of keyboard shortcuts. That may sound like a trivial feature, but it’s important for people who care about it from a productivity or accessibility perspective.
One minor complaint about Fade In has to do with its autosave options. You have to manually save your work with Fade In, by default, which feels like an outdated requirement in the era of cloud-based apps and services. If you don’t want to hit the keyboard shortcut to save every few minutes, you can enable autosave and set the app to save your work as often as every two minutes. To be fair, Final Draft suffers from the same issue, except it can only save your work automatically every three minutes. I would prefer to see autosave enabled by default. It’s all too easy to imagine people only discovering that they need to enable autosave when they lose hours-worth of work.
Collaboration Tools
Fade In lets you collaborate with others to write or edit a script in a way that’s similar to Final Draft. You need to generate a code and share it with your collaborators, who all must own a copy of Fade In. Coauthoring and editing work in real time. You and your collaborators can make changes simultaneously, while a chat box enables everyone to contribute to related discussions.
Once you are into the final pages of your script, you can track changes to your script with the Revisions feature. Revisions are different from a standard track changes feature you might find in regular office apps, in that there is no simple way to review and accept or reject them. Rather, revisions are meant for changes that occur once the script is in production. A changed page switches to a new color, while an asterisk to the side of the script shows where the change occurred. Additionally, the edit appears in a new color. You can customize and choose which colors you want to indicate changes throughout various phases of production.
An Excellent, Low-Cost Screenwriting App
Fade In is a strong alternative to Final Draft that costs less than half as much. It is more than adequate as professional screenwriting software, despite lacking a few of Final Draft’s features. Final Draft remains our Editors’ Choice winner for professionals, but people who are aspiring to get into the field can save a lot of money and get nearly as good a tool with Fade In.
